Reading Homer aloud with modern Greek pronunciation

The Odyssey begins «ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ» (Od. 1.1), “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns”, and the Iliad «μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος» (Il. 1.1), “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus”. In Greece such lines are pronounced like Modern Greek: as E. Petrounias writes for the Centre for the Greek Language, no approach to the ancient sound is attempted.

Petrounias transcribes the first line of the Odyssey in several ways. Slightly simplified, they run:

• Classical, approximately: [ándra moi̯ énnepe mô:sa polýtropon hós mála pollá]
• A possible reading by non-Greeks: [ándra moi̯ énepe músa polýtropon hós mála póla]
• A reading by Greeks: [ánðra moi̯ énepe músa polítropon ós mala póla]

In the Greek reading δ is [ð], υ is [i], the rough breathing of ὃς is silent, and double consonants have no special sound, so ἔννεπε has one [n]. Treat the transcription as a guide, not a fixed standard: the same article gives οι the regular value [i], which would make μοι [mi]. The stress in [póla] is not a mistake either. It belongs to metrical reading, the subject of the next section.

The Homeric line is a dactylic hexameter, six feet of heavy and light syllables. Its rhythm, wrote A. R. Benner, depends on “the time occupied in pronouncing successive syllables” and is “quite independent of word accent”. Modern Greek cannot keep that pattern: it has five vowels and no contrast of long and short. So, Petrounias notes, readers in Greece and abroad give heavy syllables a dynamic stress, a habit of modern European languages and not of Ancient Greek. A note in Dickinson College's Benner adds that stressing the start of each foot is a classroom technique which modern scholars no longer recommend.

The first line of the Odyssey hides the problem well: ἄνδρα μοι | ἔννεπε | μοῦσα πο | λύτροπον | ὃς μάλα | πολλὰ. In the first five feet the beat falls on a syllable with a written accent, so metre and word stress seem to agree. They part at the end: μάλα has its accent off the beat, and Petrounias's Greek reading drops it, hence [mala]; the last foot begins on πολ-, but the word is stressed on its last syllable, hence [póla].

The Iliad is harder: μῆνιν ἄ | ειδε θε | ὰ Πη | ληϊά | δεω Ἀχι | λῆος. The second foot begins on -ει-, yet the word stress of ἄειδε falls one syllable earlier. And Benner counts the -εω of Πηληϊάδεω as one syllable (synizesis), while a word-by-word modern reading gives two, [ðeo].

Students abroad need not drop the pronunciation their course uses, and for an exam they should follow it. A.-F. Christidis, writing for the same Centre, says Greeks may go on reading ancient texts in the modern way as long as they know the ancients did not pronounce them so. Keeping that distinction clear, you can try both. This is our suggestion, not a school method:

• Scan first. Mark the feet of one line on paper before you say it.
• Read for sound. Use modern values and the written accent as stress, and pause at the commas: μοῦσα, πολύτροπον.
• Read for metre. Say it again with a beat at the start of each foot, and note where it clashes with the word stress. Treat this as a study aid, not as ancient performance.
• Compare. Read the line in your school pronunciation and list the sounds that differ, such as [d] and [ð], or [y] and [i].

A good place to start is Od. 1.1–10: the same ten lines that Greek pupils find in the original in the first unit of their school book.

Reading aloud also shows how much of this vocabulary survives, and how much has moved. ἀνήρ became άντρας, which the Triantafyllidis dictionary derives by way of the accusative ἄνδρα, the very form that opens the Odyssey. ψυχή is the everyday word for the soul, but in Od. 1.5, ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν, it means his own life, a Homeric sense recorded in Liddell and Scott. θυμός, in ὃν κατὰ θυμόν (Od. 1.4), is the heart or spirit; today it is anger.

The most striking case is νόστιμον ἦμαρ (Od. 1.9), “the day of return”. According to the Triantafyllidis dictionary, νόστιμος was tied to νόστος, a return home; in the Hellenistic period it came to mean fruitful or juicy, and in medieval Greek tasty, which is what νόστιμος means at a Greek table now. Others live on only in learned use: μήνις, as in the dictionary's example «την μήνιν του πρωθυπουργού», the wrath of the prime minister, and άλγος, a pain mostly of the mind.

None of this makes the modern reading Homer's own sound. Even the classical line above is an approximation for a later period, not a record of an epic singer. The value of the modern reading lies elsewhere: the sounds you practise here are the sounds of the Greek spoken today.